I wish I could help you, cat. All I know is from listening to docs I trust who work in ICU and in watching the hospitalization numbers, including numbers in ICU and deaths in my own area. In my area, younger people are indeed being hospitalized in greater numbers and some are critically ill and have been placed on a ventilator, though we know that’s usually the wrong choice. Deaths have ticked up steadily too over the last month to month and a half. Delta’s greater contagiousness, if that is true, could alone explain the increased hospitalizations since they seem to be getting much sicker much faster due to high viral loads perhaps. People were getting badly symptomatic on day 8-10 last year, now it’s moved down to day 4-5 where they are progressing to low oxygen levels. Kory and Marik corroborate that younger and younger people are being affected, likely due to those higher viral loads impacting them sooner. Anyway, as a retired ICU nurse and then an NP in internal medicine for a total of 34 years, something is definitely different with these variant, no question about it.
I do recommend you watch this interview of Vanden Bossche and Malone conducted by Philip McMillan of Vejon Health. It's long (~2 hours), but it make give insight. For example, Vanden Bossche has a theory as to why the case rate in the UK is hovering on a high plateau (also seen in Israel) that may play a role in the rising delta CFR.
I think the reason that you are seeing delta looking like alpha now could be that to start with there is a substantial cohort who are more susceptible to it. They get sick first. They're done. Now we are only left with the more resistant people.
Isn't any nation doing random sampling of people with no symptoms to find out just how many of them are sick, unaware, and out there infecting others? I can't find any studies. I would think that this would be something everybody would be interested in knowing, so this puzzles me.
The problem with those numbers, as I understood them, was they were aggregates over all time and for all locations. But, over time and locations conditions change a lot making it hard to estimate transmission rate in general, and hard to compare because the data for different variants comes from different conditions. Among the potential confounders - lockdowns and vaccines are probably the biggest. I hadn't seen your figure 12 time series data, but a time series of estimates over bounded time intervals could allow better comparison of R0 estimates I think, without needing to control for so many variables. Of course to the extent that delta "took over" due to vaccine based selection, it's hard to get a handle that way on comparative R0.
I love how in this document they present this somewhat useless data (the aggregates) and then say, but you can't use these to compare variants because these aggregates are useless. Thanks, guys! Keep up the good work! (Grrrr! Hissss!)
Per haps we are seeing a bit of what Liu et al. suggested may occur, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1 Delta is beginning to evade neutralizing immunity in vaccinated people but some enhancing effect remains, and CFR in vaxxed specifically is increasing?
I wish I could help you, cat. All I know is from listening to docs I trust who work in ICU and in watching the hospitalization numbers, including numbers in ICU and deaths in my own area. In my area, younger people are indeed being hospitalized in greater numbers and some are critically ill and have been placed on a ventilator, though we know that’s usually the wrong choice. Deaths have ticked up steadily too over the last month to month and a half. Delta’s greater contagiousness, if that is true, could alone explain the increased hospitalizations since they seem to be getting much sicker much faster due to high viral loads perhaps. People were getting badly symptomatic on day 8-10 last year, now it’s moved down to day 4-5 where they are progressing to low oxygen levels. Kory and Marik corroborate that younger and younger people are being affected, likely due to those higher viral loads impacting them sooner. Anyway, as a retired ICU nurse and then an NP in internal medicine for a total of 34 years, something is definitely different with these variant, no question about it.
I do recommend you watch this interview of Vanden Bossche and Malone conducted by Philip McMillan of Vejon Health. It's long (~2 hours), but it make give insight. For example, Vanden Bossche has a theory as to why the case rate in the UK is hovering on a high plateau (also seen in Israel) that may play a role in the rising delta CFR.
https://www.facebook.com/162851011009411/videos/871272056853663
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/israel
Thanks for all you do.
Thank you for your work and your humility honesty.
I think the reason that you are seeing delta looking like alpha now could be that to start with there is a substantial cohort who are more susceptible to it. They get sick first. They're done. Now we are only left with the more resistant people.
Isn't any nation doing random sampling of people with no symptoms to find out just how many of them are sick, unaware, and out there infecting others? I can't find any studies. I would think that this would be something everybody would be interested in knowing, so this puzzles me.
The problem with those numbers, as I understood them, was they were aggregates over all time and for all locations. But, over time and locations conditions change a lot making it hard to estimate transmission rate in general, and hard to compare because the data for different variants comes from different conditions. Among the potential confounders - lockdowns and vaccines are probably the biggest. I hadn't seen your figure 12 time series data, but a time series of estimates over bounded time intervals could allow better comparison of R0 estimates I think, without needing to control for so many variables. Of course to the extent that delta "took over" due to vaccine based selection, it's hard to get a handle that way on comparative R0.
I love how in this document they present this somewhat useless data (the aggregates) and then say, but you can't use these to compare variants because these aggregates are useless. Thanks, guys! Keep up the good work! (Grrrr! Hissss!)
I've always been curious how SAR is measured. Wouldn't one expect SAR to drop over time due to rising seroprevalence?
How did Delta crush the other variants if it is not more contagious?
Per haps we are seeing a bit of what Liu et al. suggested may occur, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1 Delta is beginning to evade neutralizing immunity in vaccinated people but some enhancing effect remains, and CFR in vaxxed specifically is increasing?